Tag: Marathon

Friday, the 13th

The dark clouds arrived—Boris returned as PM, winning a big majority, winning a mandate for more lies and bluster for all future elections.

The silver lining faded—Corbyn refused to step down, instead asking for a period of ‘introspection’, and only promising a vague ‘will not lead the party in next election.’ Labour lost 61 seats across the country, and managed to win just one from another party. Labour has now lost two elections in a row under him; elections that any other decent leader would have won comfortably. Still, the ditherer-in-chief says he wants to introspect for a few months to figure out what went wrong!

Then the interesting stuff began.

I published my second Android app: Accelereader for Instapaper. It was in beta for a few weeks, but went into public release earlier this week. It’s always scary publishing publicly, however small the audience may be.

Then I did something even scarier—I decided on the Hanson method for training for the Paris marathon. Even the beginner program has 6 days of running most weeks; I struggle to run 5 days consistently. The beginner program also has almost two months of running 80-90 km per week. My weekly cadence has only rarely been above 50 km. It involves multiple faster-than-race-pace 10-mile tempo runs, and interval sessions that go on longer than my current long weekend runs. I’ll come out of this training season at the top of my running fitness, or broken—mentally and physically.

Not everything is scary. I made progress with the pull-ups. Today I did two full ones. Twice. Last week I was celebrating almost completing one. A few weeks ago I couldn’t even do a quarter. I also do 4-6 chin-ups a couple of times a day, up from just 1-2 a few weeks ago. (Yes, chin-ups and pull-ups are different)

I’ve also made progress with weight loss (despite the muscle gain from pull-ups and running). Yesterday, I weighed-in at 76.2Kg, a nearly 5-year low, and within hitting distance of the goal weight.

And finally, the best bit: I’ve started meditating again. I’m on a 15-day streak, sometimes twice a day, and finally getting back to being able to focus for a few minutes unbroken. If nothing else survives from this period post (I really hope the current government and opposition leadership don’t), I hope at least this will.

Continue reading Friday, the 13th

Running a marathon vs a marathon cleaning session – a case of recency bias and duration neglect

Many hours into yesterday’s cleaning slugfest, R asked me if it was harder than the marathon the previous weekend.

I was squatting on the floor, scrubbing the shelves clean while a knee and the back hurt. My instant answer was ‘yeah’.

It was a case of recency bias – I was still suffering the pain from the cleaning (I was 4 hours in by then). The marathon1 had been a week ago. System 1 distinctly felt the current pain while forgetting the one in the past.

It was also a clear case of duration neglect. At times the cleaning was harder, nastier, and maybe even more painful than the marathon. However those painful periods were few. Most of the time it was just mildly irritating and dirty.

The marathon had been, in the latter half, nearly 90 mins of fighting biting physical pain and mental fatigue. Those final 90 mins were harder than anything I’ve done in a long time. I had to use all my willpower and focus training (thanks meditation & Calm) to keep myself going.

Yet, there were no ‘peak’ incidents of pain or suffering during the marathon – just a long period of struggle. So the brain, using system 1, ranked the marathon below yesterday’s cleaning session in effort. Duration neglect + peak-end rule!

My (self) training on biases kicked in quickly. Almost immediately after I answered ‘yeah’, I corrected myself ‘this is not even close’.

  1. Since the marathon post isn’t up yet: I ran the London marathon last Sunday. I’m still recovering. ↩

It’s 2 minutes past midnight, and everyone has already been asleep for a while. Except me.

I had a productive day. Say down to work after breakfast, and except for a late lunch, and to pick up lil R from the station, didn’t move till dinner.

Gorda and Chewie had a good day though. They went for what looked like a happy walk in the sunshine. He got to play with his neighbourhood friend, Soham, in the evening. She got to do stuff she likes to do -clean and arrange stuff, and then chat with lil R.

I was in front of a monitor almost all this time.

Now all three are deep asleep, while I plot tomorrow’s actions. Tail runner at the Guildford parkrun in the morning. Hopefully, some Eggs Benedict for breakfast later, then a few hours of work, and maybe another run in the evening.

Given that Gorda let me work in peace all day today, it seems quite likely that I’ll get none of the above tomorrow, other than the park run. Wouldn’t be a bad day either way ☺

P.S.: just about a week remaining to Brighton Marathon, for which I’m woefully under prepared. Trying to drown myself in work, love, fights and TV to keep my mind off it 😦